Trendslide's journey to the app store

Published: June 6, 2012

If you have not read my first post, an introduction to Trendslide, I would encourage you to do so as this piece will build from there.The Trendslide app officially launched in the app store on April 26of this year, but before we got to this point there was no shortage of discussion, feedback, and iteration on what we had been building. In this post I will focus in on our iOS app specifically and some of the steps between idea and app store approval.Before even beginning development on the app, we knew that we would need a seamless method of updating information for graphs on the iOS device. In order to provide an optimal experience, we architected our platform to have a server-side component that internally we call the Trendslide Engine, which we'll talk about more in a future post.During the same time, we were wire-framing and mocking up how the application should look and feel. These mockups were printed out and circulated with a bunch of our mentors and early-adopters that not only provided us critical usability feedback on the app before it was even built, but allowed us to see what types of questions individuals would ask once they went through each screen. Overall, we went through about 100 different pages and gathered a great sense for the direction we needed to head in.Once development started, Ben, our rock star lead developer, would issue new versions for us to test and show potential end-users. As this continued our experience and functionality continued to improve to a point that we were ready for the app store. Through these iterations Trendslide got in the hands of more and more early-preview users and we got more feedback. It was around this same time that Ben and I received seed funding from Incutio, and decided to pursue this opportunity full-time. Overall, I think we went through 12 iterations before we felt comfortable, but depending on your application and the depth it could take much more.For any company planning on building an iOS App, we would highly suggest reading through the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. These guidelines provide clear instruction for button sizing, navigation elements, and much more. In fact, we read the guidelines a few times and did our best to ensure we were complying as best as possible.Once we submitted to Apple for the first time, given that we encrypt your business data, we had to follow some additional steps but found the process to be seamless and received some great feedback from Apple in the process.Jeffrey Vocell is co-founder of Trendslide, a Manchester, N.H.-based mobile Business Intelligence startup. For more information about Trendslide, visit http://www.trendslide.com or email jeffrey@trendslide.com.

This article appears in the June 1 2012 issue of New Hampshire Business Review